Sex education has been hijacked, so hey, teacher, leave those kids to fumble alone

I can’t remember being taught much about sex education at my comp. I have a vague memory of our biology teacher showing us a male rat giving a female rat a bit of a seeing-to. We may have been enjoined to behold the male rat’s thinnish and rather forlorn penis. Later there were baby rats. We got the picture.

But mostly we taught ourselves. I was quite terrified in third year — year 9 today — by something my close friend Brooky told me. “At the end of this year,” he said, “Mrs Proctor [the school nurse] lines every boy up and shoves a piece of litmus paper on his willy. If it goes green, you must have had sex and you’re expelled.” I was terrified because…